According to the related art, the engineering design of a component is established during product development in a so-called design phase, and a manufacturing process chain for the fully engineered component is subsequently generated in a production planning phase. The design phase, as well as the production planning phase are discrete processes that are carried out sequentially or one after another. To manufacture a component, related art methods provide for a manufacturing process chain made up of a plurality of successive process steps, namely manufacturing steps as well as machining steps, to be established in the production planning phase, efforts being directed to optimizing each individual manufacturing step as well as machining step and, therefore, process step. The underlying assumption here is that, by concatenating the individually optimized manufacturing steps and machining steps, overall, an optimum manufacturing process chain for the component is obtained.
The disadvantage associated with the above product development procedure known from the related art is that, by concatenating manufacturing steps, as well as machining steps that have been individually optimized in isolated processes, to produce a manufacturing process chain for a component, no comprehensive analysis is possible. In this respect, there is also no way to ensure that an optimum manufacturing process chain is found for a component to be manufactured. Another drawback associated with the related art product development procedure is that, because of the strict separation of the design phase and production planning phase, engineering designs for a component may be devised that cannot actually be manufactured or can only be manufactured at a high cost. Finally, due to the strict separation of the design phase and the production planning phase, initiatives are provided to the process development too late, so that new manufacturing processes or machining processes, which are required for manufacturing the component, are often not available in a timely manner.